A Swallow Press Book
By Emma Bell Miles
Edited by Grace Toney Edwards
Introduction by Grace Toney Edwards
“We’re just beginning to understand Miles’s creative output. The publication of her short stories, seen again in print for the first time in a hundred years, marks an important contribution to scholarship on rural Appalachian fiction and her role in women’s fiction of the era. Grace Toney Edwards is the leading authority today on Miles’s writings, and is the one to interpret and bring these stories forward.”
Steven Cox, editor of Once I Too Had Wings: The Journals of Emma Bell Miles, 1908–1918
The seventeen narratives of The Common Lot and Other Stories, published in popular magazines across the United States between 1908 and 1921 and collected here for the first time, are driven by Emma Bell Miles’s singular vision of the mountain people of her home in southeastern Tennessee. That vision is shaped by her strong sense of social justice, her naturalist’s sensibility, and her insider’s perspective.
Women are at the center of these stories, and Miles deftly works a feminist sensibility beneath the plot of the title tale about a girl caught between present drudgery in her father’s house and prospective drudgery as a young wife in her own. Wry, fiery, and suffused with details of both natural and social worlds, the pieces collected here provide a particularly acute portrayal of Appalachia in the early twentieth century.
Miles’s fiction brings us a world a century in the past, but one that will easily engage twenty-first-century readers. The introduction by editor and noted Miles expert Grace Toney Edwards places Miles in the literary context of her time. Edwards highlights Miles’s quest for women’s liberation from patriarchal domination and oppressive poverty, forces against which Miles herself struggled in making a name for herself as a writer and artist. Illustrations by the author and Miles family photographs complement the stories.
Emma Bell Miles (1879 –1919) was a gifted writer, poet, naturalist, and artist with a keen perspective on Appalachian life and culture. She chronicled her home region through her prolific journals, illustrations, essays, poetry, and fiction. More info →
Grace Toney Edwards is professor emerita of Appalachian Studies and English at Radford University. She was senior editor of A Handbook to Appalachia: An Introduction to the Region and coeditor of the literature section of The Encyclopedia of Appalachia. More info →
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978-0-8040-1174-7
Retail price: $28.95,
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Release date: March 2016
20 illus.
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252 pages
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6 × 9 in.
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Hardcover
978-0-8040-1173-0
Retail price: $59.95,
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Release date: March 2016
20 illus.
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252 pages
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6 × 9 in.
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Electronic
978-0-8040-4074-7
Release date: March 2016
20 illus.
·
252 pages
Rights: World
Once I Too Had Wings
The Journals of Emma Bell Miles, 1908–1918
By Emma Bell Miles
·
Edited by Steven Cox
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Foreword by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt
Previously examined only by a handful of scholars, the journals of Emma Bell Miles (1879–1919) contain poignant and incisive accounts of nature and a woman’s perspective on love and marriage, death customs, child raising, medical care, and subsistence on the land in southern Appalachia in the early twentieth century.
Literary Collections | Diaries & Journals · Women Authors · Appalachia · Ohio and Regional
Out of the Mountains
Appalachian Stories
By Meredith Sue Willis
Meredith Sue Willis’s Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities.Willis’s
Short Stories (single author) · American Literature · Appalachia · Ohio and Regional · Women Authors
Loving Mountains, Loving Men
By Jeff Mann
Loving Mountains, Loving Men is the first book-length treatment of a topic rarely discussed or examined: gay life in Appalachia. Appalachians are known for their love of place, yet many gays and lesbians from the mountains flee to urban areas. Jeff Mann tells the story of one who left and then returned, who insists on claiming and celebrating both regional and erotic identities.
Memoir, LGBT · Social Science | Regional Studies · Appalachia · Ohio and Regional · Literature
The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature
By Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt
Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development. Effie Waller Smith, an African American woman writing of her love for the Appalachian mountains, wove discussions of women’s rights, racial tension, and cultural difference into her Appalachian poetry.
American Literature · Women’s Studies · Social Science | Regional Studies · Gender Studies · Ohio and Regional · Literature · Appalachia
